Recent content by Brent Hutto

I guess it's all good until we get a director whose "vision" is to give the focus puller the day off and let his 3-year-old play with yanking the lens back and forth while he's shooting. Unless it's in a parody or otherwise having fun with the medium in an less-than-serious setting I don't have...

I can't dispute what sort of story one person find compelling and another does not. But Jesse's point is correct in that the storytelling style of Disney in the Sleeping Beauty/Snow White era could hardly be more different than Pixar's today. At one extreme (let's say Finding Nemo) you can find...

Some of our regular DVD's look spectacular on our Panny plasma and Panny BD30 Blu-Ray player. Those DVD's looked very good with the old DVD player and 36" Sony CRT as well. The DVD of North by Northwest for instance looks as good as most Blu-Ray discs. Some of our regular DVD's look very...

I'm not sure what seems too good to be true. The "dock" connector on the bottom of the iPod makes available line-level audio prior to being sent to the headphone amp section of the iPod's chipset. So that gets amplified by a somewhat more robust (higher current, drives complex loads better)...

I must say the picture quality on this Blu-Ray disc is beyond reproach. I'd bet a nickel the DVD version of Wall-E has some loss of detail (softening) or compression artifacts during the dusty brownish scenes near the beginning of the movie but it looks crisp and perfect on our 50" screen. And...

At the time you choose to play the movie from the main menu, you can choose to play it with or without the New and Improved Tim Burton Exclusive Introduction which if I recall correctly lasts about 38 seconds, more or less. It's not really much of a feature.

I have a little white plastic adapter that plugs into the "dock" connector on the bottom on my iPod and then has a 1/8" mini-jack to which I connect my headphone amp with a patch cord. Not asking the gutless amp-on-a-chip in the iPod to drive the complex load of the headphones makes a pretty...

We're going to watch Wall-E tonight but as a teaser last night we watched Presto and it was amazing how much more detail we could see (and hear) compared to either of the two times we saw it at the Multiplex. Of course neither time did we manage to score a digital-projection showing but still it...

By "older Disney films" do you mean Snow White or are we talking about The Aristocats?

The TV advertisements are billing Wall-E as being "From the Studio That Brought You Finding Nemo and Cars..." Are they kidding me? Cars? I guess the ad-writers think Brad Bird is chopped liver and The Incredibles isn't worth mentioning. I think Wall-E is Pixar's best work to date and find...

You need to be using the line outs. There are various complaints about the headphone-output sections of the different iPod models but none of them are exactly audiophile quality, at least not if "audiophile" means people that spend hundreds of dollars on interconnect cables. For that matter the...

Yeah, it's slower than our old DVD player (which was no speed demon). When you put a disk in you'll get stuff on the screen in about half a minute I'd say. But if the disk has those Java menus (seems to be most disks) you'll get a little icon while the menu finishes loading for close to another...

Well, to me standard definition TV programs look kinda washed out. They looked washout out on our previous CRT, too (Sony 36XBR800). On the other hand I've been very pleased with regular DVD's. When I brought the new TV and Panasonic BD30 Blu-Ray player home and hooked them up the first thing I...

Well, I only spent half that on a TH-50PX80U and so far after a month it still makes me sit back and go Wow every time I fire up a Blu-Ray disk or watch an NFL game. I don't know for sure about the '800U but the Panny like we bought was running in a non-torch mode in Best Buy when I was...

From 11 feet if I had the physical space and the budget for a 58" television I'd get it. Our distance is 8 feet and 50" seems just about right, although I think 46" would have been fine 42" was way too small. Your distance is three screen widths back from the display and IMO that's just about...